Understanding Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor by Robert A. Albano - HTML preview

NOTES

1 The fifth chapter of Jeanne Addison Roberts' Shakespeare's English Comedy: The Merry Wives of Windsor in Context provides a lengthy summary and commentary on the trends of Falstaff criticism. The extremely brief outline provided here is significantly dependent upon Roberts' chapter.

2 However, there is also debate on this issue. David Wiles argues that Falstaff in the Henry IV (both Parts 1 and 2) is a clown role and was assigned to Will Kemp (116). But Donato Colucci argues that Thomas Pope played Falstaff and that Kemp played the role of Shallow ("Kemp, Pope"). Colucci furthers his argument with an examination of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which, according to Colucci, Pope played Bottom and Kemp played Snug.

3 Richard Janko states the following in his Introduction: “The Poetics is incomplete, since it contains no account of catharsis, comedy, and laughter, topics which Aristotle says elsewhere that he discusses there. This is because … it originally consisted of two books, the second of which is lost. All three topics are dealt with in a medieval Greek manuscript now in Paris, the so-called Tractatus Coislinianus (T.C.); I have argued elsewhere, from its Aristotelian language, content, and structure, that this treatise is in fact a summary of the lost Book II, and accords well with what else we know about that work.